Gunpowder Empire

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The gray-haired woman nodded. “Somebody'll need a new house or a new shop,” she said. “I hope it's somebody rich.”

“Because they can afford it better?” Amanda asked.

“No, by Jupiter!” The gray-haired woman kicked at the cobblestones. “Because poor folks like me always get it in the neck. Let the rich fools find out what it's like to do without.”

Several of the other women waiting their turn at the fountain nodded or spoke up in favor of that. But then one of them said, “If the Lietuvans pounded the walls the way they're pounding the city, we'd have more to worry about.”

“Maybe they want to scare us into surrendering,” the gray-haired woman said.

“Good luck!” Three women said it at the same time. The one with the burn scar added, “You have to be crazy to surrender to the barbarians.”

“Crazy or starving!” another woman put in.

“Even if you're starving, you have to be crazy,” the scarred woman said.

“What do the Lietuvans say about us?” Amanda asked.

Like her remark about saving old buildings, that one got less understanding than she would have wanted. The women around the fountain didn't know what the Lietuvans said. Not only that, they didn't care. King Kuzmickas' subjects were the enemy, and that was that. “I hope they come down with smallpox,” one said.

“I hope they come down with the plague,“ another said, overtrumping.

Everyone shuddered at that. This world had never known a plague outbreak as bad as the Black Death of the fourteenth century. It had seen several smaller ones over the years, though-plenty to make people afraid of the disease. Amanda and Jeremy had antibiotics to protect them if plague ever came to Polisso. The locals weren't so lucky.

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Instead, they approached at an angle. That way, the guns were harder to hit, even if they took longer to get really close. At each stop on the way, the Lietuvans parked them in pits protected by mounds of earth. The Roman ca

And the Lietuvans kept on shooting, too. Every few minutes, a ca

Jeremy had thought of that, too. Here, it produced the same sort of shudder as mention of the plague had. In a city without fire engines, a big blaze was a deadly danger. The scarred woman rubbed at her cheek. Amanda wondered how she'd got burned. Even without a fire blazing out of control, Polisso had countless open flames. Lamps, candles, torches, fireplaces, cookfires, bonfires every now and then to get rid of garbage… So many things that could go wrong.

Another ca

Those first few crashes kicked up stone fragments of all sizes, some as deadly as bullets. Amanda yelped in sudden surprise and pain. A tiny chunk of flying stone had drawn a bloody line across the back of her hand. And she was lucky.

When she looked up from her own little wound, she found out just how lucky she was.

On one of its bounces, the iron ball had hit the scarred woman. It smashed her skull like a rock dropping on an egg. She lay facedown in the street. Her blood and the water from the jar she'd dropped puddled together. She'd never known what hit her. Another woman was down, clutching at her leg and screaming. Blood gushed from that wound, too. Which of the two women was luckier? Amanda couldn't have said.

Other women were also hurt by the ca

She wasn't the only one helping. Several other women who weren't hurt did the same. Screams brought men ru

Nine

Jeremy wouldn't have thought he could sleep with muskets and ca

And yet the Romans and the Lietuvans took it in stride. So did the people in the other gunpowder empires in this world. He'd wondered about that even before this round of fighting broke out. Now, lying on his lumpy bed, looking at the ceiling it was too dark to see, he thought he'd found an answer. He didn't know if it was the answer, but it was an answer.

In his world, almost everybody lived to grow old. Pain-killing drugs that really worked cushioned the end when it came at last. Before the end, most people went through most of their lives without a whole lot of pain. Few cared to risk their comforts by shooting at their neighbors. If your life was likely to be long and pretty comfortable, why would you take the chance of throwing it away?

But that was in the home timeline. Things were different here. They'd been different in his world too, before anesthetics and antibiotics and dentists who knew what they were doing. Here, babies and toddlers died all the time from diarrhea and typhoid fever and whooping cough and diphtheria. One child in three didn't live to be five years old. Here, toothaches went on and on-unless teeth got pulled while the sufferer was awake. Here, infections and boils and blood poisoning and food poisoning happened every day. Here, there were no tetanus shots. People died from smallpox and the plague and tuberculosis. If they got cancer, they died from that, too-died slowly and in agony, a centimeter at a time.

In this kind of world, war looked different. You weren't likely to live a long, healthy, pain-free life no matter what you did. If you died in battle, that was liable to be a faster, more merciful death than you would get if you weren't a soldier. With all those things being so, why not take up a sword or a pike or a musket and try to do unto the other fellow before he did unto you?

Jeremy didn't think soldiers paused and reasoned that out. They didn't have to. In Agrippan Rome-and in Lietuva, too-songs and poems and statues celebrated generals who'd won glory and soldiers who'd been heroes. If a young man didn't want to stay on the farm, what was he likely to do? Join the army. That was the best chance to change his lot he was likely to have.